Going to the very heart of Zen.

January 16, 2017

Tossing away spirituality

Just recently Hollywood director Martin Scorsese said that "we shouldn't toss away spirituality". He said this in connection with his film Silence which was released on Dec. 23. The film is based on Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name.

I am guessing that Scorsese has a much different view of spirituality than I have. I have never found the Catholic faith, which the film is about, to be spiritual—not in the way Buddhism is which asks us to realize, directly, what animates this bag of flesh and bones we’ve been thrown into since conception.

Looking at Christianity through the lens of spirituality a Buddhist might see the ‘passion cross’ as representing the carnal body upon which the soul is nailed by its powerful desire for things of the flesh. Ultimately, the lesson here is man is not flesh but spirit such that to crucify oneself is to spiritually distinguish the spirit from the flesh and its sins; thus to save the soul from further agony. Of course, this is a spiritual interpretation but one not far from Buddhism in which Buddhists seek to end suffering by realizing nirvana which, said another way, is the liberation of mind or spirit. One thus becomes free from being bound down to the conditioned psychophysical man having to undergo the cycle of birth and death again and again.

I think a long time ago the Catholic Church did away with interest in spirituality. Their focus became fixed on the passion of Christ—not the spirit in its own right as the holy. It becomes thus that as one suffers one is somehow made holy. As a consequence, there grows a confusion between spirituality and suffering. But one’s suffering, in Buddhism, does not lead to holiness. Far from it. Gaining access to spirit is accomplished by insight, by seeing it face to face.